Women Interrupted: The App Against Mansplaining

June 30, 2017

Imagine you're sitting in a meeting for work, having a conversation with your group of friends, or partaking in a discussion in your college class. Someone has just asked you a question and you begin to reply, but suddenly one of your male peers cuts you off and interjects his own thoughts on the topic before you can voice your own. Something about the situation feels wrong to you, but you don’t want to cause a scene so you say nothing and hope you get another chance to speak.

You're not alone when you feel that sour taste in your mouth after a man subtly asserts that his words are more important than yours. This exact scenario has been studied by a number of institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Brigham Young, and the data shows that men are actually cutting you off more than you might realize. In fact, men are 23% more likely to interrupt women than they are to interrupt other men. They also dominate a majority of the conversation during business meetings – 75% of the conversation to be exact. According to the University of Columbia, female students are more likely to be interrupted when they speak or to have other students answer questions that were meant for them.

With this data in mind, a new app has emerged called Woman Interrupted. It aims to give you a more personalized idea of just how much you may or may not be getting slighted in your conversations. For men, it can also tell you just how much you are doing the interrupting. First, you have to calibrate your voice so that the app can recognize when you are (or aren’t) talking by repeating a few phrases into your microphone. Then, you simply press the record button when you begin a conversation, class, or meeting, and the app tracks its course. None of the recordings of your encounters are actually kept by the app, so there’s no need to worry about the content of your words. Instead, they are immediately translated into data. After you hit stop, the app produces a chart of your day that shows exactly how much you were interrupted and at what point in the conversation these cut-offs occurred.

Men are 23% more likely to interrupt women than they are to interrupt other men.

Along with its personal feedback, the app aims to give a more holistic idea regarding the course of conversations worldwide. The app takes information from every country where it’s used and once more data is collected, it will provide a map for users that indicates which parts of the planet are cutting off women the most. Ultimately, Woman Interrupted wants to give people the opportunity to understand this issue more closely. The developers hope that by creating the tools for people to see where they stand in their own conversations, they’ll be more likely to believe and support the dismantling of the social phenomenon.

For the bSmart woman, this app is a must-have. It’s opened my eyes to how much I am contributing to the interactions in my life. In order to ensure that we’re creating a different world for the girls who come after us and the media’s perception of women as a whole, we need to have an actual voice in the conversations that shape our world. Download this app and use it in your next encounter! You won’t regret it.

Madeline is a student-athlete at New York University studying Journalism and English. Given her school’s location in Manhattan, Madeline loves to explore the city and document her various adventures on her blog, CrookedViewpoint.com. You can also find her wandering around bookstores searching for her next read and sipping an iced coffee. For a more holistic view of her creative and professional style, check out her portfolio website, MadelineHoward.com.